I have never quite made up my mind about Sylvia Plath. Is she the great poet her admirers claim her to be, or is she more of a Rupert Brooke figure, a poet of genuine but modest attainment who happened to fit perfectly a role that the Zeitgeist had created for her, and has consequently been exalted somewhat above her station? She makes an interesting contrast to her onetime husband, Ted Hughes. Ted was interested in everything, which I thoroughly approve; Sylvia Plath seems to have been mainly interested in Sylvia Plath, which is fine up to a point but can get a bit claustrophobic. And I feel she sometimes labours too much for effect, piling on image after image in a slightly frenzied way that ends up by diluting rather than reinforcing her message.

But there we are. Poetry is a kind of metaverse of many worlds through which our disembodied minds voyage, sometimes immediately drawn to one of those worlds, sometimes simply passing one by, sometimes orbiting one at a wary distance, interested but not wholly committed. I am still orbiting Sylvia, but here at least is one poem of hers with which I can more easily identify than with some others. Its concatenation of resonant images is remarkable (but again, maybe just a little over the top?), but beyond that it has a tenderness of feeling that I can relate to, perhaps because it brings back memories of comforting my firstborn when for a brief spell he would wake in the night crying, and I would rub his back and sing to him tunelessly until, probably out of sheer self-preservation, he fell asleep.

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Sylvia Plath